By thirdshiftguy on

Greetings. I have recently taken a position with a company that uses Drupal 6. I have never heard of Drupal before taking the job. I am wondering if there is any documentation about the logical flow of what it does. If potential responders have the desire to point me to the documentation pages, please save yourself the time. I have been through much of the Drupal documentation and there is LITERALLY nothing that describes the flow of functions (this function is called first, this function is called second, etc.). Perhaps I am being overly pedantic, but I would like to know the fine details of how the system works.

I wrote a python script to write php & js function declarations, variable declarations & usage, css declarations, and php includes & requires into numerous tables in a separate database just so I can easily search for things and grow accustom to the system, which has helped greatly. Is it just a matter of growing accustom to it or is there a more organised method of learning it?

Thank you and I look forward to interacting with the Drupal community.

Danilo

⋅ Categories: Drupal 6.x

Comments

NewZeal’s picture

NewZeal commented

1. Check out the API: http://api.drupal.org/api/drupal/6
2. Some of the contrib modules have their own function docs, eg views: http://views2.logrus.com/doc/html/main.html
3. If you have time, start with index.php and read through the includes files that are loaded when drupal is loaded

thirdshiftguy’s picture

thirdshiftguy commented

Thank you for your reply. The order in which the modules are loaded is a bit helpful and the order, at least in my situation, seems to be consistent. But I am looking to have more detail. Such as a flow chart or road map, of sorts, that shows what the system is doing and when.

bojanz’s picture

bojanz commented

Configure a debugger to use with your IDE (xdebug with eclipse, netbeans, or komodo, for example). Then run a request and step through all the functions.
Dilemma solved :)

There's also the option of doing a debug_backtrace() in your page callback, but that's a bit crude.

thirdshiftguy’s picture

thirdshiftguy commented

Thank you. That seems like a great option. I will give that a go.

thirdshiftguy’s picture

thirdshiftguy commented

Does this all need to happen on localhost? Can I have a debugger configured on my machine connected to a server located elsewhere?